Thursday, March 13, 2003

There's a lot of Oedipal angst going on in Blogland lately, most of it directed by young male poets against older male Language poets. I suppose I'm guilty of this myself with my claim that Nick Piombino is Emerson rather than Whitmanthough it's hardly a dishonorable position to be in, in my book. Why so much anger and invective directed against Silliman, Bernstein, etc.is it because they're more accessible to us than the poets who provide the real public face of poetry these days? W.S. Merwin and Sam Hamill were on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer last night, and my reaction to that is somewhat complicated. I fully support Poets Against the War, no matter how much solipsistic drivel it's fostered, because it's made politics relevant to poets who'd never really considered their relation to politics before. And of course it's worked in the reverse directionI find it remarkable that people at The New Criterion and even The Weekly Standard (whose influence at the White House is substantial) have felt it necessary to denounce this poetry. There's no better indication of its influence, of the threat that it poses to the nakedly imperial ambitions of what Norman Mailer, in a surprisingly cogent and coherent article), is calling the "flag conservatives." Debates about whose poetics are more righteous in this context are not unimportant; nor am I going to call for a more judicious tone or nostalgically recall the tact, good taste, and good fellowship that supposedly once characterized the discourse of poets. There have always been and always will be turf wars, and one generation's fight to escape the perceived yoke of the older generation (a strange yoke in this case, for it is the yoke of license, of having been granted permission to rebelagain I think of Piombino's wonderful notion of Freedom as tool) is inevitable and healthy.

That having been said, I wish we could start directing the energy that we're putting into invective against our Dutch Uncles and start redirecting our energies against the still-oppressive poetics of the School of Quietude. Even as Merwin and Hamill and even Billy Collins deserve our accolades and respect for the political stances they've taken, the poetics they represent is what's really keeping all us young folks down on the farm. And of course it is true that their conservative poetics cannot help but infect their politics, and that the broadly oppositional strokes they're painting now have only the crudest and most momentary utility. If we ever pass out of this moment of unignorable crisis back into the pre-prewar state in which our government's assault on freedom and the genuinely democratic was more stealthy and innocuously natural-looking, that will be the moment when we will need more than ever to assert a diversely oppositional poetics against the Collinsesque writing which forever proclaims its innocence and irrelevance. If we can't let go of our resentment and bitterness let's at least channel it in the direction where it will do the most good and make the most meaningful noise.

And how about some more estrogen in Blogland, huh? I'm tired of all these men, young and old, trying to shout each other down. If you're a woman and you're reading this, please start your own blog today.

That's one of my own lines. From an untitled (they're all untitled) severance song: After form fails a furling, reports dying away,...

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The Barons

“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

Severance Songs

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Hope & Anchor

Compos(t)ition Marble

Selah

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Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.